Use the tax amnesty which be­gins Mon­day to clean up your tax­es—in­clud­ing over­due land and build­ing tax­es—and es­pe­cial­ly since the Un­ex­plained Wealth law be­gan yes­ter­day.

That was the mes­sage from Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert and At­tor­ney Gen­er­al Faris Al-Rawi on Fri­day.

They were speak­ing dur­ing Par­lia­ment de­bate on a Mis­cel­la­neous bill deal­ing with is­sues rang­ing from the tax amnesty, an en­hanced pen­sion pack­age for leg­is­la­tors and judges, a change to the Free­dom of In­for­ma­tion Act and oth­er is­sues.

The amnesty start­ing Mon­day un­til Sep­tem­ber will re­move in­ter­est and penal­ties on tax­es and will ap­ply to all tax­es. Gov­ern­ment projects earn­ing $500m from the amnesty.

The Board of In­land Rev­enue will waive penal­ties and in­ter­est from Mon­day al­though the bill will be fi­nalised next week.

Im­bert urged peo­ple to use the fa­cil­i­ty to pay Land and Build­ing (L&B) tax­es es­pe­cial­ly since the L&B tax is payable un­der Gov­ern­ment’s Prop­er­ty Tax sched­ule. He said some peo­ple had not paid L&B tax­es for years and that had stymied their prop­er­ty sales since the trans­ac­tion re­quires such tax­es to be paid.

He al­so urged the pub­lic to clean up their out­stand­ing tax­es be­fore the T&T Rev­enue Au­thor­i­ty (TTRA) be­gins op­er­a­tions. A bill to gov­ern TTRA op­er­a­tions will be done in the com­ing days be­fore Par­lia­ment goes on re­cess.

Im­bert al­so de­fend­ed as­pects of the over­all bill seek­ing to har­monise pen­sions for judges, the Prime Min­is­ter and Pres­i­dent and that of se­nior pub­lic ser­vants. On­ly leg­is­la­tors who have served five ag­gre­gate years plus would re­ceive the ben­e­fit. He said the Po­lice Com­mis­sion­er (Gary Grif­fith) would not ob­tain it since he on­ly served less than four years as a min­is­ter in the for­mer Peo­ple’s Part­ner­ship ad­min­is­tra­tion. Im­bert said some judges had lived and died in pover­ty or lived on pen­sions as low as $3,000 month­ly.

Al-Rawi al­so urged peo­ple to use the tax amnesty to clean house since he said the Un­ex­plained Wealth law be­came ef­fec­tive yes­ter­day.

He al­so apol­o­gised for the re­cent pro­pos­al to in­crease from 30 days to 90 days, the pe­ri­od that pub­lic au­thor­i­ties had to re­spond to Free­dom of In­for­ma­tion re­quests. He said he had sug­gest­ed it and was cul­pa­ble since he was “close to the num­bers.” He not­ed there was a high com­pli­ance rate on ap­prov­ing FOIA re­quests. The pro­pos­al was cut from 90 days to 45 days and Al-Rawi said his role in the is­sue was to re­view re­fusals by pub­lic au­thor­i­ties on FOIAs.

Al-Rawi said a trend had been not­ed of an “in­dus­try of ex­ploita­tion” by some at­tor­neys. He ac­cused UNC mem­bers Anand Ram­lo­gan and Ger­ald Ramdeen of “milk­ing tax­pay­ers” re­gard­ing costs their teams had de­mand­ed on FOIA cas­es.